Pun Salad

UPDATE: As I mentioned below as a possibility, this post went partially out of date about 1 hour and 43 minutes after it went up:

pic.twitter.com/RMIRvlSOYw

— Joe Biden (@JoeBiden) July 21, 2024

"But otherwise it seems to hold up well." Except the first sentence below really should follow the headline above.

Alas, we can only imagine via Mr. Ramirez:

I don't want to overuse the word "volatile" but it has been a … well, crazy week with the election betting odds folks. Here is an as-I-type snapshot:

I was shocked and stunned by the reappearance of Hillary! This reeks of desperation. (As does everything else in that dismal D list, but especially Hillary.)

And I emphasize: it all could be different by the time you read this. In fact, this post could be out of date before I actually post it.

Also of note:

• It's difficult to imagine what inspires the modern Democrat. Jeff Maurer wonders Will Biden's "Bite Me, It's Too Late" Message Inspire Democrats?

  Democrats want Biden off the ticket. Democratic voters want him off the ticket by a margin of two to one, and most Democratic office holders see Biden’s campaign as an asteroid hurtling towards their careers. Biden needs a miracle to win back his party’s support. And the message that he seems to have settled on to achieve that miracle is: “Lick my hairy balls, I’m the nominee and there’s nothing you can do about it.”

  Maurer posted that on July 18, three whole days ago, but it's still relatively not-inaccurate. Plus, I like quoting his imaginative salty humor, which, given Scranton Joe's legendary gutter mouth, is probably not that different from what he's actually saying.

• You got trouble right here in River City. Dan McLaughlin, I think, is hitting it on the head here: Donald Trump & The Music Man’s Last Act.

  I was going to quip that while everybody wants American politics to be Hamilton or 1776, what’s really going on in mid-2024 is that one party is staging a production of The Music Man while the other one is staging King Lear. But mulling it over, I came back to a point I observed on the liveblog during Thursday night’s interminable Trump acceptance speech, particularly Donald Trump’s affecting tribute to fallen supporter Corey Comperatore and his insistence on doing a full Trump rally speech instead of a more focused speech pitched to a general election audience. Maybe the Music Man analogy is more apt than I realized.

  Recall the story of The Music Man, the 1957 Broadway musical that was made into a 1962 film starring Robert Preston and a 2003 film starring Matthew Broderick. “Professor” Harold Hill is a con artist who has managed to be run out of Illinois (this is how you can tell the show is set over a century ago), and he shows up in the sleepy Middle America town of River City, Iowa. He claims — in a falsehood that turns out to be provable — to have graduated from a music conservatory in Gary, Indiana. He actually knows very little about music, but he is remarkably persuasive and talks the townspeople into making him a youth bandleader. It will be good for the moral fiber of the boys of this heartland town, he tells them. It’s actually a scheme to collect money to buy band uniforms and then skip town with the cash. The con is not just what he does; it’s who he is.

  […]

  But a funny thing happens along the way: He becomes a mark for his own fraud. He falls in love with a local woman. He gets emotionally attached to the boys in the band who look up to him. Then, it all catches up to him, and he gets caught and arrested. But the fake band is real. The townspeople decide that Harold Hill is what he pretended to be all along, even though they know he’s a phony — and he decides to be what he pretended. In the end, they spring him from jail and put him at the head of a surprisingly adequate marching band.

  Could the Baseball Crank have it right? I don't know; I went to see Twisters last night, and I'm pretty sure I can't hammer out a better political analogy from that source. But stay tuned, I might try.

• Just a reminder. And it's from Ilya Somin, blogging at the Volokh Conspiracy. GOP VP Nominee J. D. Vance is an Enemy of Free Markets.

  Ohio Senator J.D. Vance just became Donald Trump's running mate. If you care about free markets and liberty generally, he's just about the worst person the Republicans could have chosen, among those who got serious consideration.

  Since being elected to the Senate in 2022, Vance has become one of the GOP's leading champions of protectionism, economic regulation and planning through "industrial policy," restrictions on foreign investment, and—of course—immigration restrictions. As Alex Nowrasteh and I explained in our article "The Case Against Nationalism," these right-wing forms of central planning have most of the same weaknesses as their socialist counterparts. These policies create terrible incentives, and predictably make the nation poorer and less innovative.

  This won't bother at least one of the folks at Granite Grok who is fond of referring those favoring economic liberty as "fwee-marketeers".

  It does kinda bother me. Given Trump's age and propensity to draw gunfire, a President Vance could do some serious damage.

• This ain't the dawning of the age of Aquarius. What we got here, according to Christian Britschgi, is the year of The Chaos Election. After summarizing the campaign so far:

  It seems increasingly likely then that this election will be determined as much by a slight turn of Trump's head and a few misfiring neurons in Biden's as it will be by either man's record in office or plans for a second term.

  The takeaway from the 2024 election being the chaos election isn't that nothing matters. Rather, it's that the result should matter a lot less.

  If the next president isn't the person who won the argument, assembled a die-hard coalition, or forged a new consensus for governing the country, it stands to reason that that next president should command a lot less control over the government and individual citizens.

  If, as [NYT columnist Ross] Douthat muses, "there is no obvious next political stage for a civilization's development," then maybe the next president should give up on trying to impose whatever that next civilizational stage might be.

  To be sure, chaotic, random politics doesn't equal libertarianism or even suggest growing support for libertarian ideas. Seemingly the opposite is true.

  But it does mean people will quickly come to reject and resent the next administration's efforts to govern the country and control their lives, regardless of whether that attempted control comes from Team Red or Team Blue.

  I don't have a dog in this fight. As long as the argument is over who gets to torment their enemies, Barney and I are tapping out.

Recently on the book blog:

One thing was obvious from the get-go: the author, John Strausbaugh, is no fan of the Soviets, or Communism in general. Great! Neither am I. As (even) the cover and the title indicate, this is a warts-and-all look at the history of the Soviet space program. And it turns out to be mostly warts.

It's been a few years since I read Stephen Walker's Beyond, a history of the events leading up to and including Yuri Gagarin's slightly-under-one-orbit flight in April 1961. Safe to say that Strausbaugh's take is less respectful, less academic (no index or endnotes), and more of a (somewhat guilty) pleasure to read.

We know that the Soviets had their share of space disasters, notably Soyuz 1 (killing Vladimir Komarov) and Soyuz 11 (killing Georgy Dobrovolsky, Vladislav Volkov, and Viktor Patsayev). Strausbaugh goes into the gritty details of those failures. But, as he tells the whole story, it's pretty amazing that the body count isn't much higher; the Soviets were very slapdash, explicitly trading off cosmonaut safety against scoring propaganda victories. Example: Gagarin's flight was nearly a disaster due to the failure of his Vostok's reentry module to cleanly separate from its service module. This was a continuing problem with the Vostoks, and continued into the Soyuz spacecrafts.

The book might be a little slapdash itself. Page 107 puts the Apollo 1 disaster (which killed astronauts Gus Grissom, Roger Chaffee, and Ed White) in 1963. (It was 1967.) Strausbaugh knows better, and he gets it right later in the book, but (come on) a light fact-check would have caught this.

In other spots, gratuitous and strained US/USSR comparisons are made. Gagarin's post-flight parade placed him and Nikita Khrushchev "in a convertible Zil with the top down, like the Kennedys in Dallas." Wha…?

Strausbaugh does a good job of giving the Soviets personalities, not always complimentary ones. After his flight, Gagarin mishandled his fame, turning into a drunk and a womanizer. His friend/rival Gherman Titov, also succumbed. The famous "chief designer", Sergei Korolev, suffered in Stalin's Gulag for six years before his "meteoric" success in getting the space program off the ground. But he failed dismally in his design of the N-1 rocket, a rough equivalent to the American Saturn V. It never worked, blowing up a lot.

Strausbaugh does pay some respect to Cosmonaut Alexei Leonov, who might be the closest to Tom Wolfe's famous "Right Stuff". He nearly got killed doing a spacewalk stunt (an impromptu effort to upstage Ed White's upcoming Gemini EVA); he got along famously with his American counterparts during the planning and execution of the Apollo-Soyuz stunt mission.

The Soviets were also notoriously secretive, which caused a lot of speculation they were covering up some cosmonaut deaths. One of the rumor-mongers was Pun Salad fave, Robert A. Heinlein, who penned an article for American Mercury recounting his trip to the USSR with his wife, Virginia; he reported rumors that the May 15, 1960 flight of Korabl-Sputnik 1, the first test flight of the Vostok craft, was actually manned. Nope.

In short, an entertaining read, guaranteed to wipe away any misty watercolor memories of the way the Soviets were. You'd never know from reading it, however, that the American astronaut body count is much higher than Russia's. NASA is also a socialist enterprise, and its safety tradeoffs were merely different in details.